Director – Tsai Yin-chuan – 2025 – Taiwan – 133m
****1/2
Teachers In a care home attempt to break the cycle of violence among their charges – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival
This is one of those films that takes place in several different times in the characters lives, including when they are children, teenagers and adults. That means that you need more than one actor to play each character at different times in their lives, and if you’re going to attempt that, you’d better get your casting right, so that when you see the second actor playing an older or younger version of the character, you instantly recognise that character.
I wanted to rate this compelling film as five stars, but it has severe problems in this area – it’s really hard working out which character is which in the various different times in which events take place. Studying the end credits helped somewhat in this regard, but that information really ought to be expressed more clearly within the film narrative itself. (To see an example of a film that tackles this multiple character casting brilliantly, see Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2018).
The casting issue aside – and it’s no reflection on the actors or their performances, rather whether they convince you that they are the same character as the other actor, which is more to do with how similar they are than anything else – this is pretty gripping stuff. It’s divided into sections.
The brief opening sequence entitled Toy has small boy Xiao Zi-hi (Hung Chun-han) lying on his bed holding a bear and coddled by his mother (Tai Yu-tien). All very homely. We’ll later see various boys in an orphans’ home, including one boy named Bear, and one sequence in which teen bullies abuse a young child’s bear, hanging it as if from a noose in a wardrobe.
At the orphan’s home / school, a teenage girl (Rimong Ihwar) forces herself on a slightly older Xiao Zi-hi (Hung Chun-hao) – she lures him into an empty classroom with a story that a teacher wants to see him. The act is clearly against his will. The boy subsequently becomes a target for her bully of a boyfriend (Wells Su). The boy tells a teacher Renxing (Fandy Fan) who tells him to be quiet about it since the girl will have graduated in six months and the situation will thus resolve itself.
In a sequence entitled Dog, in an ideal world, in the child’s mind, he plays with a mum and dad and dog and a frisbee.
In the real world, Renxing is running a ball game in the field near the home when a boy at the edge of the field stumbles upon the maggoty corpse of a dog. Local people tak to the village elder about bad kids. They believe a boy called Bear has killed the dog.
Meanwhile, another boy Awei (Jett Lin) loves to pet a stray dog the kids have named Yellow; his friend, a girl called Xiao Yu (Hwang Pin-yu), gives the dog a bowl of water. Awei is new to the home, and doesn’t realise that if someone’s parent shows up asking for their child, you don’t just take the child to them as he does, innocently, with Xiao Yu when her dad shows up. The older Bear (Chen Yu Yan) berates Awei for this.
Meanwhile, the home has a funding review coming up, so the staff are advised by Director Ding (Ding Ning) to put all their energies into writing reports – which means they can’t spend as much time as they should with the kids. Bear continues to cause or get into trouble now accuses Awei of stealing, and a stolen note is found in the boy’s bag. When Awei claims he doesn’t know how it got there, you’re inclined to believe he’s been framed, especially when Bear suggests that the head of the village is responsible for the death of the dog, which sounds highly unlikely.
Then Yellow turns up dead, his jaws having been stitched together with wire. Renxing and Awei say their goodbyes to him standing by the little cairn which marks his burial place. Later, Awei tells the teacher that Bear has been abusing him, and gives unsettling sexual details. Bear has also been abusing another boy, Hua (Joshua Tseng). The three share the same dorm, so Renxing has the two younger boys moved to another dorm.
In a second episode called Sea, a group of older boys arrive in South Korea to be driven to a seaside factory, basically a boiler room where they work on the phone tricking people out of money. Some of the boys take a cynical delight in taking their victims for as much as they can get out of them, but the older Awei (Tseng Jing-hua from Detention, John Hsu, 2019) has a conscience about it, and when he suggests he’s uncomfortable about this, is put in solitary confinement by his thuggish supervisor (Nien Shih-kai) and his supervisor’s boss (Lai Sang) until he rings his grandmother to scam her. Alas, that’s the only way he’ll get out of the situation.
Then we come back to the care home, where Bear has finally overstepped the mark one time too many, and is about to be sent to juvenile court and probably be sent to prison. He appeals to Renxing’s better nature to speak up for him in court, to give the boy another chance, but the teacher is appalled when he learns that everything the boy has said to get him on his side turns out to be a pack of lies.
Further revelations include Xiao Yu’s lost teddy bear being found under a boy’s bed, and a sequence in which the older Awei, having escaped the South Korean boiler room and now working with toxic pesticides to help clear his debts incurred by his grandma (Chang Pei-huei) to a loan shark, meets another boy his age Chuan (Jeng Bing-hong) who drives an expensive car, hangs out with pretty girls and suggests he come and work for him. Which sounds like a very bad idea.
If it’s not always that easy to follow who’s who among the care home children future, past and present, this shows what is clearly a system in crisis. The boiler room sequence reminded me of Boiler Room (Ben Younger, 2000) while the care home material recalled the more coherent Short Term 12 (Destin Daniel Cretten, 2013). Overall, despite its shortcomings, this remains effective as a bleak portrayal of these children’s lives and prospects, and the challenges faced by the teachers charged with looking after them. It also presents a pretty searing picture of sexual abuse of some children by others, a subject rarely touched upon with the ferocity exercised here.
That Burning House premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival which runs in cinemas from Friday, November 7th to Sunday, November 23rd 2024.
Trailer:
Critics’ Picks mashup trailer:
Festival teaser trailer: